Books, arts and culture

Daniel Arsham

Working up a storm

EXPECT the unexpected—at least when viewing Daniel Arsham’s work. This New York-based artist blurs the boundaries between dance, design, architecture and art. His current exhibition, “Reach Ruin” at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, is Mr Arsham’s largest solo show to date, spread over two floors of the museum. On the ground level, three plaster models of cameras are displayed alongside a series of monochrome gouache-on-Mylar paintings of a man on the moon. Nearby are human sculptures: a figure stands against a wall, shrouded from head to waist in what appears to be white fabric but is actually aqua resin, fibreglass and epoxy. A few metres away, a similar work gives the illusion of a human form behind a white sheet blowing in the wind (though there is nothing behind the sheet). “So much of my work is about making architecture do things that it really shouldn’t do, making it perform in unexpected ways, and collapsing the materiality of it,” says Mr Arsham. The results merge the surreal with the mundane.

Much of this show was inspired by a traumatic childhood memory. He was 12 when Hurricane Andrew swept through Florida in 1992. He hid in a reinforced closet in his Miami home while the storm destroyed nearly everything around him. The experience left him with some unforgettable images: decimated drywall, shattered glass, pink insulation turned to mush, and warped aluminium studs. “Reach Ruin” is an anagram of “hurricane”.

The sculptures on the eighth floor stand as a reflection of the aftermath of the hurricane: 11 jagged columns constructed from white drywall and pale green shattered glass look like an eroding forest. Two other sculptures of human figures made from architectural foam coated with shattered glass sit on plinths; one deep in thought, the other staring down (pictured above). “It’s about taking this material that has no purpose, that’s broken, that’s useless, and remaking it back into a figure, or an object that has that kind of intention behind it,” says Mr Arsham.

The centrepiece of the space, “Storm”, is a multimedia opus that encapsulates the horror of a hurricane in a tunnel of shattered glass with loud haunting music, flashing lights and gusts of wind. Mr Arsham considered this work for a decade before it finally came together this year with the help of Andy Cavatorta, an MIT-educated roboticist, who wrote the software to synchronise the score, lighting and four industrial blowers. After Mr Arsham and his team completed a rough version of the piece, Mr Cavatorta installed the technology. The two tinkered together on the final product until the opening day of the exhibition.

Many of Mr Arsham’s projects are the products of collaborations. “Oftentimes my work runs up against these constraints where I don’t have the entire skill set to make something happen,” he says. He works with choreographers, architects, designers and other artists. Mr Arsham designed sets for “eyeSpace” in 2007, a dance piece choreographed by the late Merce Cunningham. The two worked separately in their own practices, Cunningham creating the choreography and Mr Arsham conceptualising the set, lighting and costumes. “I would make my thing, he would make his, and we’d bring it together.”

Not all of Mr Arsham’s collaborations are done the same way. He has developed scenography with Jonah Bokaer, a choreographer and former dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, several times. For their most recent pairing, “Study for Occupant”, a dance piece that was performed over the opening weekend of “Reach Ruin”, Mr Arsham presented Mr Bokaer with one of his white plaster cameras. “I said dancers can draw with these on the floor, they can shatter them, they can misuse them, and he builds this whole world out of that,” says Mr Arsham. A video-loop of the performance is playing on the seventh floor within the eerie, blue set.

Then there is Snarkitecture, a Brooklyn-based collaborative practice set up in 2008 between Mr Arsham and Alex Mustonen, an architect he met while both were studying at Cooper Union a decade ago. Last December, during Miami Art Week, the pair exhibited “Drift” at the entrance pavilion to Design Miami: a suspended bundle of inflated tubes made from white vinyl configured to resemble a pattern you could make on a 3D pin toy.

Their commissions are varied—Snarkitecture has created a retail installation for a Richard Chai clothes store (a glacial cavern made from white architectural foam), a commemorative sculpture outside the former Orange Bowl stadium in Miami (a yellow tangle of goal posts) and public art at the new baseball stadium, now home to the Miami Marlins (four columns of pulsating light). “I choose these collaborations largely on connections that I have with people,” says Mr Arsham. “If I can’t work with someone and I don’t have a kind of language that I can build with them, then it’s not interesting.”